Mugo wa Kibiru: The Story of the Kikuyu Prophet

Mugo Wa Kibiru the Great Sage of the Gikuyu
Mugo wa Kibiru or Chege (Cege) wa Kibiru is a famous Gikuyu healer and prophet man who lived in the 18th and early 19th centuries in Kariara, Murang’a near Thika.

According to Kikuyu folklore Mugo wa Kibiru was found alone in the forest by a hunter called Kibiru as he was inspecting his traps. It is not known who his parents were.

Kibiru the hunter who found Mugo was from the Gikuyu Anjiru clan who were traditionally associated with prophecy and powerful medicine. How Mugo wa Kibiru came to be in the forest is not known. Even more mysterious is that when Kibiru asked him what he was doing in the forest, Mugo replied that he had been with Ngai (God).

Kibiru decided that he would adopt the young Mugo, and bring him up as one of his sons, not knowing how great this child would become. Kibiru the hunter changed this mysterious child’s name from Cege to Mugo wa Kibiru. The name Mugo means ‘healer’.

Before he was circumcised, the young Mugo’s looked after his father’s goats with the other boys in the community. Out in the field, he would often leave his age mates and go into the forest.

From an early age he possessed the powers to control wild animals and they did not harm him. When other boys asked where he had been, he would reply that he had been with God.

When Mugo wa Kibiru grew up, he began prophesying. He prophesied about the coming of the white man. He said that there would come a strange race of people whose skin colour was like that of a small pale frog that lives in water (Kiengere) and that one could see their blood flowing under their skins just like the frog.

He also said that these pale strangers would have colourful clothes that were like butterflies (ciihuruta). He warned the Gikuyu that it was foolish for their warriors to ever face these pale strangers with spears because they possessed magical sticks that produced fire (guns shooting bullets). The white men also carried fire in their pockets.

Part of his prophecies also foretold the destruction of Gikuyu tribal customs where the Gikuyu youth would start copying the behaviour of the white man. Cooked food which was previously not sold in the Gikuyu custom would also be sold by the road side.

The plains where the Maasai used to graze their cattle would be turned into farmland. Chege predicted with astonishing accuracy that there would be a famine in Kikuyuland that would exterminate much of the tribe right before the arrival of these pale coloured strangers or foreigners.

Mugo wa Kibiru also foretold of the building of the Kenya-Uganda railway, which he described as an iron snake having many legs that swallowed the white men and spat them out wherever it stopped. The iron snake, would have a bushy head that bellowed smoke.

One of his most famous prophecies was about a fig tree growing in Thika that would die only after the white men left the country sixty-eight years after colonization.

Even the white men acknowledged Mugo wa Kibiru’s powers of prophecy and tried fencing off the tree in an attempt to prevent anything from happening to it but shortly, after independence, the tree was struck by lightning and quickly withered.

Mugo wa Kibiru legacy lives on
Mugo wa Kibiru made prophecies about the future, and some of them were warnings for his people. Today it is scientists who warn us about the future. If we continue to clear forests and burn fossil fuel, the Earth’s temperature will rise. Warmer temperatures will make life very difficult. Let’s do our part in Kenya by conserving all our forests!